The modern office typically is overcrowded with equipment and documents, creating undesirable clutter and significant work inefficiencies.
In particular, most workers have numerous documents which are involved with work in progress, or are stored for ready accessibility or reference, and hence must often times be readily accessible and visible if possible. For this reason, many offices employ tackboards and other types of devices disposed adjacent and in surrounding relationship to worksurfaces so as to permit numerous papers and other documents to be clipped thereto, as by means of pins or tacks, so as to be readily visible and accessible. Such arrangements typically require that the office worker leave his chair so as to access the document, or typically involve wall-type constructions which surround the worksurface and thus greatly restrict overall openness and visibility at the worksurface.
Office workers also often utilize various types of spindles and miscellaneous types of clips, typically disposed in freestanding relationship on the top of the worksurface, to support documents or papers, and while such arrangements do permit the papers to be readily accessible, they nevertheless occupy significant space on the worksurface and thus greatly minimize the available space for efficient working.
It is an object of this invention to provide an improved arrangement which facilitates the gripping, display and accessibility of documents such as papers or the like, which minimizes or avoids utilization of valuable worksurface area, and which minimizes or eliminates surrounding structures which severely restrict openness or visibility adjacent the worksurface.
The present invention relates to an improved clip which can be easily gripped and manually manipulated in one hand so as to permit gripping of a document such as a paper between a pair of opposed gripping jaws. The clip can be used independently to permit gripping of one or more documents between the jaws, and includes mounting structure which readily permits the clip to be supportingly but removably engaged on a support rail, whereby the clip can be disposed to permit a document to be suspended upwardly from a worksurface in a region which does not significantly obstruct the worksurface, but yet provides physical and visual accessibility to the document. The support rail and clip have cooperating structures which permit the clip to be readily mounted on and slidably moved along the rail to permit selective positioning of the clip. The rail is stationarily mounted relative to the worksurface, such as adjacent and extending along a rear edge thereof in upwardly spaced relation so as to utilize space which is normally not otherwise efficiently used, and hence avoids interference with the top area of the worksurface.
The structural and functional advantages of the clip of this invention, as well as the desirable cooperative clip-and-rail arrangement of this invention, will be apparent upon the reading the following specification and inspecting the accompanying drawings.